Of New Dead & Old Dead

Heads Up, Deadheads!

Only a few weeks after concluding Joe Citro’s and my four-month signing tour for The Vermont Monster Guide, I’m back on the road in February to celebrate the opening night debut of The New Dead, featuring my new short story “Copper.”

I was hoping we’d get to spend some time with Joe Hill, too, but Joe will be kicking off his signing tour for his new novel, Horns, on the same night at the River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH, where Joe will be signing The New Dead as well. So, add that bookstore to the destination list (can you drive from Framingham to Portsmouth in the signing timeframe? I don’t know!).

The 19 provocative, haunting, and genuinely unsettling original stories in this zombie anthology move the genre beyond its usual apocalyptic wastelands. David Liss’s novelette “What Maisie Knew” is a stunning and gruesome meditation on the banality of capitalism and evil. Mike Carey’s “Second Wind” is a haunting tale of an undead stockbroker who comes to question whether he ever truly lived. Lovers of more traditional zombie fare will also not be disappointed. Joe Hill’s ingenious “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” tells a classic slasher film story through Twitter posts, while Jonathan Maberry’s heartbreaking “Family Business” describes a ruined America populated by kindly monks and zombie hunters. This powerful anthology shines a bright and unflinching light on the fears of death, decay, and loss that underpin America’s longstanding obsession with the undead. (Feb.)

* Also coming in February, from Tor Books, is the launch title of a new line of Heavy Metal ‘fusion’ fiction.

Kevin Eastman used to be a pal of mine, until Heavy Metal‘s attempt to sell CD-Rom sets of Heavy Metal sans permission or payment of the creators prompted a blowup ending in Kevin ‘exiling’ me from his planet. It’s all water under the bridge, but I’m always curious about what he’s up to as a publisher (special thanks to Mark Masztal for bringing this to my attention this AM). Make your own call on this, but stick with this sleazy trailer to the final frame, folks!

“The team of palaeontologists from the University of Bristol, UK, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, University College Dublin and the Open University report two kinds of melanosomes found in the feathers of numerous birds and dinosaurs from the world-famous Jehol beds of NE China.

Melanosomes are colour-bearing organelles buried within the structure of feathers and hair in modern birds and mammals, giving black, grey, and rufous tones such as orange and brown. Because melanosomes are an integral part of the tough protein structure of the feather, they survive when a feather survives, even for hundreds of millions of years.”

Whew — you’re not going to get any comicbook series named after you with that name!

One of the paleontologists involved is Thomas Carr, now at Carthage College in Wisconsin, whose studies of tyrannosaurs were mentioned in my own humble comic effort S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant®, including publication of an article by Thomas (see “Jurassic Park: A Dinosaur Critique” by Thomas Carr, Tyrant #2, November 1994, pp. 26-27). Congrats, Thomas, and great to see you making history!

The article in the January issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology states that the fossils date from approximately 10 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex emerged, though B. sealeyi definitely belongs to the same dinosaur linage as my favorite dino. Also involved in the research were Thomas Williamson, curator of Paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, among others.

Sorry I can’t make your signing, but I’ll be in NYC covering the Toy Fair that day. We need to do a “pulp” project, something pulpier than anyone else. a hardboiled tough, no romance just sex, moist and meaty pulp thing.

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